Newsroom

News

“...We believe the project has the potential to make a significant positive contribution to one of South Africa’s most dire challenges – increasing both participation rates and the number quality passes of disadvantaged Black learners in the important subjects and careers requiring Mathematics and Science at university,” said Thandi Orleyn, chair of the Zenex Foundation.Read more...

Long-standing Zenex Foundation Trustee and South African business and civil society leader, Thandi Orleyn is the new Chair of the Zenex Foundation. She assumed the role in October 2015, succeeding Mr Sizwe Nxasana, who will continue serving on the Board as a Trustee.

Thandi has been a Zenex Trustee since 1997 and has played a central role in providing strategic guidance to the work and programmes of the Foundation over the past 19 years. Her legal and business career of over 30 years spans the Legal Resources Centre, National Director of both the Independent Mediation Service of SA (IMSSA) and the Commission for Conciliation, Mediation and Arbitration (CCMA), and senior partner at the commercial law firm, Routledge Modise (presently known as Hogan Lovells (SA) Inc.).

An executive director and shareholder at Peotona Group Holdings, Thandi is also involved in various community initiatives, including chairing the Legal Resources Trust, Ceramic Foundation, De Beers Fund and the Fort Hare University Council, and now the Zenex Foundation.

A stalwart of transformation and empowerment, Thandi will continue to play a strategic role in spearheading the Foundation in its mission to work in partnership with Government, donors, NGOs, researchers and schools towards improving education outcomes in South Africa. This bodes well for the Foundation as it accelerates its efforts to share evidence-based lessons learnt from independent research and evaluations to contribute to knowledge and capacity in the sector.

The Zenex Foundation has funded an innovative on-line resource developed by Bridge to help learners, teachers, career advisors and parents when it comes to decisions about getting into further study or employment after school.

The Zenex Foundation wishes all the schools and learners participating in the National Schools Festival a fun, creative and insightful week ahead.

The Zenex Foundation has been a proud partner of Grahamstown National Schools Festival for the past 8 years. We are honoured to have built a mutually rewarding partnership which promotes the arts curriculum in schools. We recognise the role played by poetry, art, drama and song in cultivating a love for language and enriching exposure to reading and writing resources.

“Schools controlled by the South African Democratic Teachers’ Union (Sadtu) are best understood in terms of what they are, namely crèches or daycare facilities, rather than in relation to what they are not – education institutions”Read more...

The Zenex Foundation initiated a Legacy Scholarship Project in 2015 as part of commemorating the Foundation’s 20th anniversary. The Project falls under the Foundation’s Sector Strengthening Programme, which has the overall objective of building the capacity of key strategic elements of the education support sector. To this end, the Scholarship Project focuses on addressing the problem of scarce skills in Monitoring and Evaluation (M & E), as well as education research, through the development of Black evaluators and researchers. This area of support is particularly important in the context of an increasing interest in evidence-based approaches to education policy and practices.

Zenex has been involved in M & E and education research for more than 15 years. Through its experiences, it has become clear that there are very few evaluation experts and even fewer Black evaluators and researchers working in the field of education. As such, the Foundation initiated a two-pronged capacity building Scholarship Project to contribute towards building capacity in these areas.